quinoa
I've been making a lot of the NY Times Recipes for Health lately. They're healthy (although not always low-calorie), usually reasonably easy to make and almost always tasty. This week I made the Royal Quinoa Salad with Tofu and Sesame Ginger Vinaigrette. I thought it needed more broccoli than the recipe called for, but otherwise it was pretty good.
Tofu isn't kosher for Passover by traditional Ashkenazi standards, because it's made from beans, which are "kitniyot" — not really leaven, but sort of guilty by association. (Either because you can make bread-like foods out of them, or because they were grown in adjacent fields, not clear.) A couple of years ago, I decided that worrying about kitniyot wasn't particularly meaningful to me — I won't eat cornbread, but I'm not going to worry about corn syrup, or tofu.
Quinoa's a different issue. Although it sure looks like a grain, biologically, it's a member of a different family. More to the point, it's a new world plant, and was totally unknown to the rabbis who wrote the laws about Passover. So it's kosher for Passover, even for those observe the prohibition on kitniyot.
Passover ended tonight, so we had the traditional pizza for dinner.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Corn is also a new world crop. If the rules just went by old world vs. new world, cornbread would not be kitniyot.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Pizza is our family tradition for the end of Passover, too. This year I used the make-at-home pizza shells I’ve been getting from the store. Take out pizza is much more expensive in Toronto than it was in Boston, for some reason.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:32 am
P.S. did you buy buttermilk just to use 2 T in this recipe or do you keep it around? That is one factor that sometimes keeps me from trying something new — buying a pint of something I’ll only use 2 T of.
April 17th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Madeleine, we often have buttermilk in the house because I use it for Julia’s Oatmeal Buttermilk Pancakes:
http://julia.typepad.com/julia/files/oatmeal_buttermilk_pancakes.htm
But we didn’t this week, so I used the powdered stuff, which was fine. You can also use whey (if you make yogurt), or add a little lemon juice to milk. Or just use milk.
April 17th, 2009 at 11:21 am
I love the Recipes for Health link. Thanks!
April 20th, 2009 at 6:07 am
I’ve successfully used yogurt in cooking several things where the recipe calls for buttermilk – or sour cream.